About my reading in 2011

About my reading in 2011

Looking at the list of books I read In 2011, I seem to have increased the share of non-fiction, though not greatly compared to 2010.

My big achievement in this area was to read Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” which I had failed to finish on a previous attempt. The trick is not to get stuck on the pseudo mathematics “let x be..” and the intimidating looking formulae. You just skip over them because he nearly always immediately goes over the same argument again in less abstract and plainer English. He is very convincing and it’s hard to diagree with him, so you end up really wishing his policies were being acted on more right now. The great thing about Keynes is that he sees money not as an end in itself but as a means to satisying needs. For him the real purpose of economic policy should be to provide employment and this is too important a task merely to be left to the markets and speculators, for they fail at it. There is a clear rôle for the state. In our twenty-first century, post-cold-war world of roaring unfettered capitalism, that is of course an unwelcome message to big finance. But Keynes’ time will come again, the economies of the developed world are in free-fall, and his policies are what we need in order to return to a fairer world of shared prosperity. Not that Keynes was a socialist by any means, but he grasped why certain economic behaviour is actually counter-productive, even if that may seem counter-intuitive.

An easier but very enlightening read on contemporary economics is Lanchester’s “Whoops” a great explanation of how we got where we are in the current crisis; but offering no quick-fix solution, although he clearly points in the direction of my own preferred option: nationalize the banks, because they have failed us, lost the plot and are starving the real economy of its lifeblood.

In the popular science department, I read Deutscher’s “Through the language glass” a potentially intriguing book for a linguist on the subject of how the language we speak may influence the way we think. In the end he spends most of his time on just two examples: the well known fact that words for colours are not an exact match between languages; and the fascinating case of some remote tribal languages that base directional information not on the changing egocentric view of the speaker (eg left, right) but on a fixed geographical framework (eg north, south).

I was going to read all of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” but somehow ran out of steam half-way through volume 2 around about Justinian. Volume 1 is a cracking good read though.

I read a couple more books by De Botton “Status Anxiety” and “Architecture of Happiness” but I’m starting to find him a little inconsequential; although he writes elegantly and makes some good points, he can give you the feeling of lacking an overall compelling argument which leads you to a conclusion.

Weightier indeed was J.S. Mill“On Liberty” and “On Utilitarianism”, two basic texts of political philosophy.

My Hellenist friend Umberto gave me a good essay by Grosdent “La Grèce existe-t-elle?”, which is amusingly written in the style of a Platonic dialogue. The subject turns out to be quite topical with the ongoing crisis (Greek word of course) in Greece. Grosdent takes to task the Western idealizing vision of an Ancient Greece that probably never was but which causes disappointment when confronted with the Modern Greece. He argues that the modern is indeed a descendant of the ancient, it’s just that we were a bit naive about the ancient.

Rousseau’s “Confessions” I guess I should still include under non-fiction, though they have clear literary pretensions. They are in fact two books. The first is quite disarmingly frank and a fascinating read. In the second book his confessions start to get more paranoid and self-justificatory. However, while on the subject of himself as a young man he has no particular axe to grind and this is a refreshingly sincere warts-and-all autobiography. I certainly frequently thought “what a prat”, but this perhaps is the point as he challenges us into questioning some of our own unreflecting behaviour, certainly when young and more spontaneous. Clearly the biggest problem with Rousseau is that he gave away his own children for adoption and then proceeded to pontificate in vast tomes on education. What a prat! I’m sorry but there’s no way around that one.

I also read “Le contrat social” which like many French monuments is not all it’s cracked up to be. This short text is a bit overly descriptive of existing systems and skimpy on ground-breaking political thought; it is rather lightweight compared to Hobbes and Mill. The French intellectual establishment is good at self-publicity, whereas the English, in so far as it exists, tends to forget its own heroes.

I also re-read some of Pascal’s “Pensées”, actually as it’s name suggests a collection of often brilliant insights though never mustered into a coherent whole.

I turn now to fiction. Last year I got seriously into audio-books for very long car journeys, so one or two of these titles were actually listened to rather than read, but I think we can still count that in this survey.

I re-read Dostoievski’s “Crime and Punishent”. I still think a great book, but it doesn’t get any less strange and let’s be frank, Raskolnikov must be pretty unhinged to kill just out of curiosity.

New to me on the classics front was Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”, a ripping yarn whose resourecful heroine endears herself to the reader notwithstanding her breaking of several moral codes.

Stendhal’s “Chartreuse de Parme” is another epic adventure story, this one also offering a study of ambition and of the Italian psyche.

Another French classic was Balzac’s “Lys dans la vallée” which is worth persevering with through all the descriptive passages for its rather unexpected outcome which puts the rest into a different perspective.

The author I read most of last year and who was new to me was Emile Zola. I listened to the early murder story “Thérèse Raquin” and read six of the series of twenty novels about related characters from the same large family, the Rougon-Maquart, living in France in the mid 19thC, so almost contemporary with him. Zola wanted a real setting for his stories or “natural” as he called it, but to our modern minds it is more often what we would call urban and industrial. He researched each novel carefully and includes fascinating descriptions of how things work rather than the rather boring superficial descriptions of how things look typical of Balzac. In fact the setting takes on a life of its own and plays a leading rôle as one of the characters, an infernal machine often consuming and destroying the working man. Thus Germinal is about coal-mining and an ill-fated strike, la Bête humaine about the railways and living with a murder on your conscience, l’Assomoir about working class alcoholism, l’Oeuvre unsuccessful artists contemporary with the impressionists, Nana about the theatre and high-class prostitution, and l’Argent about the stock exchange and speculation. These seem surprisingly modern subjects for novels over a century old. In terms of plot, I find Zola refreshing, instead of yet another love story, improbable action packed adventure or whodunnit, the interest relates to the outcome of a more down to earth drama. Zola’s characters are frequently weak and driven by money and/or lust. His dialogues are convincingly real. I like him, so I may yet read the other fourteen.

After all last year I read my 17th and 18th Graham Geene the early “England made me” set mainly in Stockholm and the late “The Human Factor”, a realistic cold-war counter-espionage story. Perhaps, with their eye for sordid local detail and what really motivates people, Greene and Zola have a lot in common.

And so, finally, to recent fiction.

On a Jonathan Coe recommendation I bought the acclaimed Japanese novelist’s Murakami’s “Wind-up bird chronicle”, which like many books I buy would probably have adorned my shelf unread for a long time had it not been for a theatrical adaptation of it I was going to see at the Edinburgh Festival. Anything Japanese brings with it a certain sense of other-worldliness, something for which I think the expression “cultural difference” is too polite to render the utterly different take on life. Coe said he admired Murakami’s writing for the way in which everyday life serves in it as a trigger for profound insights into the human experience, which is in his way what Coe does in his writing. Only Coe is Western and Murakami is Japanese. So Wind-up bird turns out to be startlingly original, certainly for a Western reader, and often quite odd, even unsatisfying, but definitely not boring and sometimes actually quite poetic in its imagery in a way that stays with you afterwards.

The American Jonathan Frantzen has a huge reputation, and I loved “The Corrections” written in 2001. He is not very prolific and his next novel “Freedom” only appeared in 2010. I think it is good but not as good as “the Corrections”. I also had troubles with it stylistically and I suspect that his choice of a simple English close to the colloquial American vernacular will make it age quickly. Still it is very much a novel for today about what is wrong with America today.

Mathhew Kneale’s “English Passengers”, which won the Whitbread prize for a first novel 10 years ago, is a styslistic tour de force being written in as many different styles as its various narrators. It’s a great many-layered story, both funny and moving, initially about how a Manx smugglers’ ship gets chartered for a crackpot vicar’s quest to find the Garden of Eden, but ultimately about 19thC British colonial racist treatment of Tasmanian aborigines. The ending is brilliant.

Finally let me talk about Joe Powell’s “Breaking of eggs”. The title comes from Stalin’s famous quote comparing making a revolution to making an omelette, “it can’t be done without...” The hero is a Polish born communist sympathizer living in Paris who used to make his living writing tourist guides about Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin wall and state socialism changes all of that and he embarks on a journey of political and self-discovery, realizing he has been living in a world of self-delusion and that many lives including his own were broken by the old system. It is a fascinating story written in a thoughtful, sensitive, uderstated way that evokes a huge chunk of post-war history we have been hastily brushing under the carpet or summarizing in convenient slogans.

So that’s what I have been reading over the last year. I hope you may be stimulated to try some of these titles for yourself.